The Internet as an inherently deviant and ‘corrupting’ medium

Moving beyond the ‘Virtual Immortality’ (VI) and ‘Suicide Websites’ (SW) sub-frames, the main ‘Internet Suicide’ (IS) frame, used to explain the South Wales deaths, also raises concerns about the Internet medium per se. The discussion on whether this new medium could possibly lead to alarming Bridgend-like phenomena is twofold: firstly, one that centres around the different types of online risks and the extent to which the Web serves as a deviant ‘paradise’ or a facilitating tool in the hands of cunning individuals, who commit their reproachful acts online, while staying anonymous and thus, undetected;

secondly, one that considers the potential implications of excessive Internet use, which is often elevated to a generational problem. This is a problem of older generations’ inability to understand contemporary youth’s obsession with the medium in question, but most importantly, a problem of a new ‘cyber-generation’ or ‘Web generation 2.0’ (Ferreday, 2010: 411), whose members can, as the mother of a Bridgend victim puts it, ‘speak to each other on the computer but do not know how to express their emotions in other ways’ (Melanie Davies, quoted in Pilditch, 2008: 10). This wider Internet perspective is present in all the sample newspapers, which bring up the Bridgend example in a number of news stories and mostly, feature articles and comments (61 in total and the primary point of focus in 24 of them; see Table 5.E) either to endorse their view of cyberspace as a ‘safe haven for misbehaving’ (Selwyn, 2008) or, in the case of The Guardian and partly, The Times and the Express, to argue against it.

Regarding the virtual aspect of the problem, there is a general skepticism around online social interaction alongside a realisation that, as the ‘virtual’ permeates more and more into the ‘physical’, whatever happens online inevitably has actual ramifications and that there is absolutely no way to foresee all cyber-threats. The apparently endless list of online risks brought in discussion can be divided into two categories, each presupposing a different level of agency, but both identifying young users as victims in need of protection: on the one hand, risks involving illegal online activities, either resulting in the

Table 5.E:

Bridgend as evidence of a wider Internet problem?

 [‘Grade waits in the wings for ITV plot to develop’]* (The Times, January 25, 2008: 65)

 ‘How about a life-affirming epidemic?’ (The Times, February 12, 2008:15)

 ‘Children’s social network pages ‘must have privacy lock’ (The Times, April 2, 2008: 4)

 ‘Suicides lead to call for websites control’ (The Times, August 28, 2008: 8)

* Media analyst Dan Sabbagh’s comment in the ‘Business’ section of The Times, in the second (untitled) part of which, he criticises the unjustified hostility against social networking sites in the wake of the Bridgend suicides.

 ‘They took their own lives seven years apart. But were Simon and Natasha victims of the internet?’ (The Sunday Telegraph, January 27, 2008: 22-23)

 ‘Facebook spells end of lasting friendships, says expert’ (The Daily Telegraph, July 4, 2008: 5)

 ‘Beyond the digital divide lies a new world of intimacy’ (The Guardian, February 21, 2008: 33)

 ‘When teenagers lose touch with reality’ (The Independent, January 24, 2008: 43)

 ‘Just upstairs, and horribly at risk’ (The Independent on Sunday, January 27, 2008: 42-43)

 ‘A bad week for the Web’ (The Independent on Sunday, March 23, 2008: 6)

 ‘Privacy is down the YouTube and real friends are history; Teenagers weaned on the instant gratification of the internet do not understand the dangers that lurk in its virtual world’ (The Independent on Sunday, July 6, 2008: 20)

 ‘The Internet Suicide Cult? / They lived and died online’ (Daily Mail, January 23, 2008:1, 4-5)

 ‘Wild child who surfed her way to suicide’ (Daily Mail, January 23, 2008: 5)

 ‘We are creating a generation for whom reality now exists only on a computer screen’ (Daily Mail, January 24, 2008: 14)

 ‘Tragedy and the strange, lonely borderless world inhabited by too many teenagers’ (Daily Mail, February 21, 2008: 14)

 ‘400 Facebook friends, but who else did the web let into Laurent’s life?’ (The Mail on Sunday, July 6, 2008: 28)

 ‘Dark side of YouTube’ (Daily Mail, July 31, 2008: 37)

 ‘Social websites like Bebo give a shoulder to cry on’ (Daily Express, February 7, 2008: 39)

 ‘Can the internet be made safe?’ (Sunday Express, March 2, 2008: 6)

 ‘Bridgend suicide lad’s web threat’ (The Sun, February 23, 2008: 23)

 ‘Don’t let net snare your kids’ (The Sun, March 21, 2008: 25)

 ‘Teens on internet 20 hours a week’ (The Sun, March 24, 2008: 11)

 ‘Logged on to despair’ (Daily Mirror, January 26, 2008: 21)

 ‘MySpaced out’ (Daily Mirror, July 4, 2008: 27)

immediate victimisation of unsuspecting users in cyberspace or laying the ground for their victimisation in the physical world at a later stage. On the other hand, the Internet medium’s potential, though still questionable, capacity to gradually ‘corrupt’ innocent youngsters by blurring their sense of morality, eventually leaving them unable to communicate and disenchanted with the physical world.

In the first of these two categories of Internet-related risks, attention focuses on chatrooms and social networking sites, particularly, on the Web’s ability to eliminate time and space barriers and bring together people who have never met or are in hostility with each other in the physical world; an ability, which sometimes has unexpected consequences, ranging from identity fraud and cyber-bullying to online grooming for sex or, in the case of suicide chatrooms, even for death. In such occasions, victimisation is absolutely undesirable, but the victims only become aware of the risks they are up against when it is too late. In other words, in this case, the problem consists in a naïve use of the medium, that is, a tendency of Internet (especially younger) users to unhesitatingly disclose their personal information to online ‘friends’ they sometimes barely know, without realising that, by neglecting to safeguard their privacy, they render themselves easy targets for aspiring online ‘predators’. ‘In the right hands the internet is both a great educational and social tool. But in the wrong or naïve ones it can have tragic consequences’, writes Jon Gaunt (2008: 25) in the Sun, who, using a hunting metaphor, urges parents to not ‘let [the] Net snare [their] kids’ (my emphasis).

As for the second category, this is widely based on and encourages a view of the Web as a liberal, highly sexualised space, where all kinds of physical-world deviants seek refuge and live out their fantasies; a carnivalistic, unregulated space, which owes a large part of its popularity precisely to its ‘dark’ side (Presdee, 2000; Jewkes and Sharp, 2003;

Sharp and Earle, 2003). Within this category, youngsters are regarded as being only a few clicks away from websites containing hardcore pornographic or extremely violent material and pro-anorexia/bulimia/self-harm or suicide chatrooms, bringing together vulnerable individuals, who, unlike one would expect, support each other, not in overcoming their condition, but in perpetuating it. The main difference to the first category, focusing on the existence of unanticipated outside cyber-risks is that, in this case, it is possible that users visit such webpages on purpose. Therefore, the corresponding risk is inclusive rather than exclusive and consists in the possible ramifications of being a member of a particular virtual community. Nevertheless, the anti-Internet perspective most frequently adopted in the Bridgend coverage is, to a large extent, a deterministic one, which fails to see the bigger picture: journalists subscribing to this perspective tend to confine themselves to a short-sighted criticism of the Internet medium for the easy and socially unstigmatised access it provides to potentially harmful online content. At the same time, however, they usually overlook the equally, if not

more, important issue of why people choose to access such material when they are given the chance.

Discussing Internet safety, both the Bridgend MP, Madeleine Moon, and the Independent Chair of the IWF Board and Commissioner of the PCC, Eve Salomon, underline the vital need to educate children and parents about the plethora of risks pervading cyberspace. Nonetheless, each of them endorses a different understanding of the risks in question. The first draws parallels to physical-world situations like crossing the street or having a pen pal precisely to illustrate how real these are. On the contrary, the second partly attributes the anxiety around them to older generations’ bewilderment with a new medium like the Internet and argues that, as long as children are taught how to be responsible online, they have nothing to worry about:

‘Here, we have something called ‘the Green Cross Code’ about crossing the road: look left, look right, look left again...[…][E]very parent teaches their child that rule. […] We need to embed into parental behaviour an awareness of the need to teach our children Internet safety. […] [W]hen I grew up, I had a pen pal. […] Now, people have almost taken that to an extreme of having pen pals all over the world. That is not the same as having a friend. People on social networking sites are not your friends, but we have diminished what being a ‘friend’ means.’

(Madeleine Moon, interviewed on March 10, 2010; my emphasis)

‘[The Internet] is a new medium and we, as the older generation, find it all rather bewildering. We are not as competent even as our children, who are using the Internet.

So we feel it is out of control because it is out of our control. But as children grow up with […] a good understanding of what is and is not appropriate for them to see, the Internet will be a much less scary place. I think that the important thing is teaching children how to be responsible and how to use the Internet as a really important tool and not to be scared of it. That has really got to be the way forward.’

(Eve Salomon, interviewed on June 9, 2010; my emphasis)

The argument that the Internet can have such a strong influence on human psyche as to cause despair and depression to previously vivacious adolescents or to ‘corrupt’

them in any other way brings the ‘media effects’ debate to the digital age. Particularly, it is reminiscent of the so-called ‘hypodermic needle’ theory, developed in the early twentieth century and based on the assumption that media have a dominating power over a passive audience, which uncritically ‘consumes’ their content (McDonald, 2004; Ferreday, 2010).

It is exactly this allegedly passive ‘consumption’ of inappropriate media content by contemporary youth, which is considered problematic on multiple levels: first of all, a

continuous exposure to such explicit and violent online material is seen as likely to normalise the depicted socially unacceptable behaviours (gang rape, forced fights, knife crime, anorexia and suicide among others) and to give young users the impression that such behaviours are acceptable or, even worse, desirable in the physical world.

Expressing her concerns as a parent in the wake of Bridgend suicides, Fiona Phillips (2008: 21) of the Daily Mirror argues that physical-world norms do not apply online and that the more young people encounter violent online content, the more desensitised to it they become. In fact, she refers to these physical-world norms and values as ‘the rules of normal life’ (my emphasis), thus suggesting a superiority of the physical over the ab-normal virtual world, let alone a superiority and a sense of normalcy with tangible moral implications. A similar point of view is adopted by Sally Emerson (2008: 14) of the Daily Mail, who likens the Internet to a monster or an ancient god who lures people to an alternative deviant reality, giving them the chance to surrender to their (offline seen as morally condemnable) passions, without, however, having to be treated as social outcasts because of that:

‘The paedophile chats with other paedophiles and thereby makes his lusts seem normal – after all, in his virtual community everyone feels the same. The handsome young man discusses hanging himself with a friend and suddenly, in the privacy of his room, with the written word sanctifying his bizarre plans, his craziness seems less crazy because it is shared. […] On the internet, people risk losing our ordinary everyday community and shared ordinary values. In the kingdom of the internet you choose your values, choose your obsessions. The censures, the checks and balances of society are no longer there and even suicide can be applauded.’

(Emerson, Daily Mail, January 24, 2008: 14) As far as the Internet use of the Bridgend victims is concerned, Paul Harris’ (2008) account of Natasha Randall’s suicide in the Daily Mail is illustrative of this supposedly corrosive nature of the medium and particularly, of social networking sites. Describing the victim as a ‘[w]ild child who surfed her way to suicide’ (my emphasis), Harris (Daily Mail, 2008: 5) embraces, but, at the same time, goes beyond the VI theory. He suggests that Internet tributes to suicide victims may indeed glamorise suicide, but are only the final stage in the alarming moral downfall taking place online. Going through the victim’s Bebo profile, he comments on her username ‘sxiwildchild’, her revealing photographs and a quiz, addressed to her online ‘friends’, asking them, amongst others, whether they would have sex with her. He is staggered by the amount of personal information given and, ultimately, by the fact that such an adult-oriented space is not just accessible to

teenagers, but, actually, co-created by them. ‘You have to keep reminding yourself when you read her page that she was only 15, according to her membership profile, when she set it up’, he writes, while also pointing out that such content ‘should never be accessible to any juvenile with a fake email address, which, incidentally, is all it takes to join Bebo’

(Harris, Daily Mail, 2008: 5).

Furthermore, aside from the type and explicitness of the content Internet users are given access to, the Internet medium per se is often accused of alienating young people from the physical world and depriving them of basic social skills. In fact, the medium’s power over its young users is allegedly such that it eventually turns them into zombie-like individuals, who spend their days and nights staring blankly at their computer screen, unable to express their feelings anywhere outside of cyberspace (Ferreday, 2010). The local MP, Madeleine Moon (quoted in Seamark and Salkeld, Daily Mail, 2008: 11 and Sawer and Copping, Sunday Telegraph, 2008: 8) is, once again, a key proponent of this view: ‘[T]here is a risk from spending too much time in the alternative reality of computer games and chatrooms’, she states in the House of Commons. ‘For a vulnerable person contemplating suicide, communication through words on a screen does not provide the warmth, humanity, compassion and empathy of talking to another person’

(for the full parliamentary debate on suicide prevention, see House of Commons, 2008a).

At the same time, the psychiatric research of Dr Himanshu Tyagi, cited in the Telegraph (Smith Rebecca, 2008), the Independent (Street-Porter, 2008), the Mail on Sunday (Jones, 2008) and the Mirror (No author, 2008a), suggests that, being accustomed to the instant gratification of the Web, the ‘Facebook generation’ is incapable of forming long-lasting offline relationships. Due to their disappointment with the ‘boring’ physical world and their inability to perceive the actual consequences of their actions, its members are deemed likely to behave in an impulsive or even suicidal manner. ‘This is the age group involved with the Bridgend suicides’, says Dr Tyagi (cited in Smith Rebecca, The Daily Telegraph, 2008: 5) ‘and what many of these young people had in common was their use of the Internet to communicate’.

In relation to this youth disenchantment with the physical world, Bel Mooney’s (Daily Mail, 2008: 14) comment constitutes a remarkable deviation from the Mail’s standard anti-Internet approach. She, too, acknowledges that the Bridgend phenomenon goes far beyond a single geographical area and is, in all probability, a product of ‘the strange, lonely, borderless world inhabited by too many teenagers’ nowadays. She points out that youngsters of today have come to believe actual death is as permanent as that of

their avatar, i.e. their virtual persona, instantly coming back to life again and again.

Equally disquieting is, according to her, the fact that they can only communicate in a text and e-mail jargon, that is, an oversimplified, abbreviated and ultimately, eroded and incomprehensible version of the English language, full of ‘lol’s (an acronym for ‘Laugh Out Loud’) and smileys. ‘The web […] is a much more dangerous phenomenon than we’ve even begun to comprehend’, she writes. However, unlike other Mail journalists, Mooney (2008: 14) takes a step back to also reflect on the social factors potentially offering an explanation as to why adolescents seek refuge in the virtual reality of cyberspace in the first place. She raises a number of issues like parents’ absence from their children’s lives, family breakdown, lack of human contact, the influence of celebrity culture and the growing individualism of late modernity, which will be further explored in the context of the BB frame in Chapter Seven. Through the consideration of these issues, she indicates that the Web is not the cause, but the most convenient arena for teenagers to express their dissatisfaction with the physical world they inevitably live in. In reaction to this feeling of dissatisfaction, which has deep social roots, youngsters construct an alternative virtual reality. This is a stimulating reality, which often defies physical-world norms and raises a series of ethical dilemmas that they naturally find difficult to deal with, without any adult support. As Mooney (2008: 14) eloquently puts it,

‘[t]he internet represents total freedom – a boundless ether filled with everything and nothing, which is an apt metaphor for the moral emptiness, the lack of direction and guidance, in so many young people’s lives’.